Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery

by Henry Marsh

Psychological research has shown that the most reliable route to personal happiness is to make others happy.

We have achieved most as surgeons when our patients recover completely and forget us completely.

Whereas the surgeon, for a while, has known heaven, having come very close to hell.

If patients were thinking rationally they would ask their surgeon how many operations he or she has performed of the sort for which their consent is being sought, but in my experience this scarcely ever happens.

Anxious and angry relatives are a burden all doctors must bear, but having been one myself was an important part of my medical education. Doctors, I tell my trainees with a laugh, can’t suffer enough.

would be so much less suffering if we did not. Life without hope is hopelessly difficult but at the end hope can so easily make fools of us all.

I experienced once again my visceral hatred of hospitals and their dull, indifferent architecture within the walls of which so much human suffering must be acted out.

I have learned over the years that when ‘breaking bad news’ as it is called, it is probably best to speak as little as possible. These conversations, by their very nature, are slow and painful and I must overcome my urge to talk and talk to fill the sad silence.

It’s not that we felt anxious – the three of us knew she was dying – I suppose what we felt was simply intense love, a love quite without ulterior motive, quite without the vanity and self-interest of which love is so often the expression.

‘There are two great benefits to medicine as a career,’ I said to Rob. ‘One is that one acquires an endless fund of anecdotes, some funny, many terrible.’

‘What is the second benefit of a career in medicine?’ Rob asked politely. ‘Oh, just that if one falls ill oneself one knows how to get the best care.’

Few people outside medicine realize that what tortures doctors most is uncertainty, rather than the fact they often deal with people who are suffering or who are about to die.

Hope is beyond price and the pharmaceutical companies, which are run by businessmen not altruists, price their products accordingly.